Adobe enhances Spark design tool with branding capability

Adobe enhances Spark design tool with branding capability

Submitted by David Cardinal on Tue, 09/19/2017 - 08:08

As a photographer who sometimes needs to create my own banners and Facebook ads, I’m a big fan of Adobe’s Spark design tool. I’ve also used it extensively to create prototype web page layouts to help commercial clients visualize how a product launch or marketing campaign might look. Adobe has just added some exciting new capabilities to Spark, which now allows users to “Brandify” their content. Basically, you can add a logo, focus color, and favorite font, and Spark’s back end will create versions of its templates that respect and use your brand elements.

In the grand scheme of things this isn’t rocket science, exactly, as you could of course add your logo, palette, and font manually, but it is a huge time saver and since Adobe’s back end knows about your choices, they are nicely integrated into the generated template. Here is a quick example that I created from one of the many Spark Event templates and less than a minute of customization (resizing the overlay, customizing the text, resizing the logo, and putting in my own photo). I wanted to turn down the opacity of the Red overlay, but for some reason the Opacity slider didn’t work:

Branding is the first of what Adobe is calling Premium capabilities for Spark. They are available to all paid Creative Cloud subscribers (including those who only have the Photographer plan – that includes Photoshop and Lightroom). You can also get a standalone Spark subscription, but at $100/year it is almost as much as a Photographer Plan, so you’re almost certainly better off just getting the Photographer Plan ($120/year) (or a full subscription for $600/year if you need other tools like Premiere or Illustrator, of course).

Adobe Spark continues to be one of my favorite new tools. While your creations are hosted by Adobe by default, you can export them as graphics and use them on your website or in emails, posts, or for social media ads. The only limitation on that I’ve found is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to re-host full Pages created using Spark. They need to be recreated if you want to use them on your own or a client’s website.

Existing capabilities of Adobe Spark continue to be free, although you do need to create an Adobe ID to use it, if you don’t already have one. You can get started at spark.adobe.com. The branding features are available to Creative Cloud paid subscribers immediately.

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